User Profile

Hello. My name's the_underwood and I'm a record geek. Welcome to my blog.

The Pitchfork Retort Project will be a song-by-song response to pitchfork.com's The Pitchfork 500: Our Guide to the Greatest Songs from Punk to the Present. These posts won't be reviews, exactly – you probably don't need some radom guy on livejournal to tell you that Fugazi's "Waiting Room" is a really swell tune. Instead, these entries will contain opinions, meditations, digressions, dismissals, jokes, and praise. I'm hoping that the Pitchfork Retort Project will be a both a look back at more than fifteen years of near-obsessive record collecting, an exploration of new sounds, and maybe, just maybe, I'll learn why I still care deeply about popular music as I enter my third decade. This blog also shouldn't be mistaken for a fan letter to the site that published the book that inspired it. I'm a regular 'fork reader, sure, a sometimes reluctant member of a worldwide quasi-scene that seems to have grown up around the site, but I'd like to keep things short, snappy and relevant. In terms of style, I'd like the Retort to be the anti-Fork. What I'd like to take from Scott Plagenhoef and Ryan Schreiber, the editors of the Pitchfork 500, is what I see as their genuine love of rock music, their commitment to exploring rock's margins and, finally, their conviction that rock isn't something we have to look back on. Like them, I'm not ready to concede that rock music peaked back in the sainted sixties. There are great songs are still being written today, and there are thousands that I've yet to hear.

Oh, and in case you were already wondering, I have seen Julie and Julia. Hush, you haters.

All set? Here we go. Feel free to turn the volume up.

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